Mobile Phones - A curse or a boon?

There are many stories of lives being saved when someone suffers a heart attack whilst in the middle of nowhere and the victim is rescued because their companion rang the emergency services on their mobile. This is one reason why so many people own mobiles – security. The young and old are reassured that by owning a mobile, help can be on its way in the touch of a button if an emergency situation were to crop up.

However, owning a mobile may increase your chances of being mugged. Recent figures have shown that street crime is up by nearly 50% with most muggers stealing mobiles, and with the average pay as you go package costing £99, these second hand mobiles are quickly sold on to other youths for a much cheaper price.

New research indicates also that using a mobile phone while driving greatly increases the risk of having an accident whether the phone is hand held or hands-free. The study also confirms that the danger remains in the minutes after a phone call has finished. At least 12 road deaths have been linked to mobile phones in Great Britain but it is believed that mobile phones have been involved in thousands of other accidents.

But for anyone owning a mobile phone, these are worrying times. “Mobile phone killed my man,” screamed one headline last year. This is because mobile phones are becoming more and more linked with memory loss and even cancer because of the microwaves they emit. John Tattersall exposed slices of rat brain to microwave radiation. He used the part of the brain that controls memory and learning and the results showed that the brain was affected. Fortunately scientists told us that the hippocampus (the part of the brain he tested) is buried too deep in the brain to be effected.

But another experiment that gave pessimistic results was conducted 18 months ago in Australia. Researchers exposed mice to radiation mimicking the emissions of digital mobile phones and discovered that twice as many mice developed abnormalities than animals not exposed. But since then, teams of scientists have failed to find similar evidence of increased cancer rates, one result suggests using a mobile can actually increase a human’s reaction rate. But these are simply experiments and unless a significant trend is seen it is impossible to say whether mobiles phones can kill.

One thing is for sure though, whatever they emit, whether harmful of helpful; children are more susceptible to the radiation than adults because their skulls are thinner and as we don’t fully understand the effects of radiation people have become more cautious about children using mobile phones. Walt Disney recently introduced a range of Disney phone fascias but was criticised because they encouraged children to own mobiles.

Some scientists say that with only one thousandth of the power of a microwave oven, a phone cant cook your brain, if your ear gets warm it’s simply the devices batteries and circuitry heating up. So should we forget about mobile phone radiation causing brain tumours and scrambling our minds? “If it doesn’t reliably cause cancer in animals at high doses, then it probably isn’t going to cause cancer in humans,” says John Moulder, a radiation oncologist. And with 46,000 new users every day last year, the cancer scares have not proven enough to stop people texting, voice mailing and one ringing. And while the scientists continue to argue whether mobiles help or hinder us, the advice given to users is: don’t panic… but watch this space.